Crumbs in my 'Stache: Where beans sing (and aren’t over-roasted)

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

By Planet User

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-The American coffee revolution, the trend that began in grunge-era Seattle in the early 1990s, continues its march into Jackson Hole.

The Snake River Roasting Co. is Jackson Hole’s newest purveyor of roasted coffee beans. The business is the venture of Hard Drive Café owner Ruth Ann Petroff and her business partner, Paul Moynihan.

Moynihan, who once owned a liquor store in Jackson, left the valley for Coeur d’Alene, in northern Idaho, more than a decade ago. In Coeur d’Alene, with Doma Coffee he began his artisan pursuit of small-batch coffee roasting, seeking to coax out the delicate secrets of a finely roasted bean.

For her part, Petroff, who has worked closely with coffee for years and was inspired by Italian café culture, put in hours of research to learn all about roasting coffee – from bean selection to roasting conditions.

Snake River Roasting Co. subscribes to the northern Italian tradition of coffee roasting, in which the bean is more delicately roasted.
“I never take the bean past the point where the roast takes all the nuances away,” Moynihan said.

Not to suggest that the valley’s other quality coffee roasters – Great Northern or Jackson Hole Roasters – would ever dream of it, but plenty of big brand coffees over-roast coffee beans to mask a less desirable flavor.

More than simply keeping an eye on temperature and roasting time, small-batch coffees require the roaster to pay attention to each batch. Rather than relying on a sure formula to yield a good roast from a particular bean, the roaster has to trust his sight and smell, while adjusting for variables like barometric pressure and humidity.
“It’s similar to running a specialty coffee café,” Petroff added. “You have to adjust the grind [of the bean], the length of time with the shots.”

Moynihan pointed to the growing movement of artisan-style coffee as a parallel to the emergence of micro-brewed beer, which led to market shifts that are changing the beer industry.
“The same thing is happening in the coffee industry in that there’s a reactionary trend,” he said.

Snake River Roasting Co. uses all-organic, fairly traded coffee beans from among the world’s great coffee growing lands – Ethiopia, Kenya, Peru, Sumatra and Papua New Guinea.

I had an espresso, which had a stripe of dark brown running through a crema the color of peanut butter. It was as fine an espresso as I’ve had in the valley.
Outside of Hard Drive Café, Snake River Roasting Co. coffee is served around the valley, including at the Mangy Moose, Jackson Whole Grocer, Altitude and Calico, and is lining up deals with carriers in Idaho and Montana.

Photo by ANDREW WYATT
Paul Moynihan of Snake River Roasting Co. boasts the “Diedrich.”

PERMALINK:
Crumbs in my 'Stache: Where beans sing (and aren’t over-roasted) | Planet JH News Article: Restaurants And Dining

Leave a Comment